Sony's PlayStation Plus Has 41.5 Million Subscribers

The health of PlayStation or Xbox is often diluted down to the amount of consoles sold. But an even more important metric - particularly to investors - is how many active subscribers each console has.

Sony's PlayStation Plus service, which users need if they want to access online play for the PlayStation 4, currently has 41.5 million subscribers. The figure was announced during Sony's Corporate Strategy Meeting, highlighting the difference between the amount of people who have bought a PlayStation 4, and the amount of active PlayStation 4 users.

PlayStation's other subscription services have grown in demand over the last year, too. PlayStation Now has 2.2 million paid subscribers worldwide, up from just over 1 million at the end of March last year. Remote Play is also much more popular since the release of the Android and iOS apps, with Sony revealing that Remote Play's monthly active users has risen by around two and a half times in the last year - but the company did not disclose precisely how many MAUs Remote Play had.

Sony also recently revealed the success of their most recent first-party titles in the US and Europe, including Detroit: Become Human, Spider-Man, Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn. Marvel's Spider-Man was the most successful, selling 13.2 million copies almost a year after its release, while Horizon: Zero Dawn sold around 10 million copies by the end of Christmas 2018. Uncharted 4 sold 8.7 million copies in its first year.

The strategy meeting made no mention of PlayStation VR, or its success worldwide. The company did pledge to show a "compelling lineup of titles soon", and that the console was on track for a launch before the end of this calendar year. The briefing did note that cloud gaming would be a core pillar of the PlayStation 5. "The PlayStation Now cloud streaming game service and Remote Play functionality enable users to enjoy a seamless gaming experience anytime, anywhere," Sony's statement to investors said.

Originally released on November 27th, 1998 in Japan, the Dreamcast was a shot at redemption after Sega's last console, the Saturn, had a less than stellar time competing with the Playstation and Nintendo 64. Something had to change in order for Sega to keep a horse in the console race. The Dreamcast had it all: incredibly powerful graphics, online capability through dial up, and a playful take on media. Hell, the memory card, also known as the Visual Memory Unit (or VMU) had a screen built into it. Sega was here to play and they did it wonderfully.